Customer Reviews

LAND OF THE BLIND

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Outstanding novel told from the aspect of the main character flashing back on pertinent events in his lifetime that have led up to his current crisis. Told in a similar style to John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany", yet immensely easier to read. The plot flows more smoothly and maintains your interest throughout.

The story begins like your average detective/crime novel, but quickly becomes a flashback story as the main character - in attempt to write a confession - tells the story of his life and the life of the dead body discovered by police.

The title of the book comes from the old saying: "In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man rules all." The author manages to incorporate the saying into the story in a way that will startle and move the reader. An outstanding effort with twists and turns around every corner.

Jess Walter is a fantastic mystery writer. Perhaps too good for the genre and in this novel, he starts to go beyond it, what one reviewer called, 'transcending the genre'.

In this novel, Caroline Mabry, from his previous novel plays more of a supporting role in the memoir of Clark "the Loon" Mason. He wants to confess to a homicide and begins writing it out on legal pads as she checks the small bit of information he gives her. But we get to read his confession as he writes it, starting with his initial meeting with the deceased in middle school continuing on to how their lives twisted together to bring them together at the conclusion of the story.

While not the standard mystery, I couldn't put this book down, finishing it in two sittings. Jess Walter writes so well, he should probably take his next book outside of the mystery genre. The description in this book is graphic and sensory, the characters are believable and interesting.

I highly recommend reading this novel.

The label "crime novel" is inadequate to describe this powerful and haunting book. It gets under your skin in ways that the common whodunit can't approach. First, the structure is inspired. A eye-patched man walks into a police station, asks for a legal pad and begins to write a long and rambling confession. A confession to what? We don't know, and neither does the cop, Caroline Mabry. The bulk of the book consists of this confession, which is a remarkably vivid and sensitive memoir of the traumas, bullying and casual cruelties of childhood. Eventually, Mabry picks up enough clues to uncover the man's true crime. Yet the book's strength is in its theme: That the scars of our childhood last all of our lives. They shape our adult personalities in ways we cannot understand. This man's physical scar is evident; he lost an eye in a childhood accident. The book is full of allusions to sight and vision. Yet the entire book shows us that his psychic scars were far more debilitating and just as permanent. "The Land of the Blind" will stay with you long after you put it down.

© 2003 by Diana Guerrero (allianceofwriters.com)
Detective Caroline Mabry meets lots of lunatics on her night shift, but this one with the eye patch is a gem. He wants to confess, but to what? When he says homicide, the journey begins. The reader travels back in time through his long written confession infused with brief glimpses back into the present and the thoughts of our heroine. An interesting read, I found the description of boyhood, teen trials, and related events to be vivid and entertaining. Land of the Blind is not your run of the mill detective story. I recommend it.

A police procedural with an ingenious false-confession plot involving belated revenge on school bullies. It's set in Spokane and is full of Spokane atmosphere. Spokane is apparently a place where anybody who goes away to college in the great sophisticated metropolis of Seattle is regarded as an over-educated city slicker. Nobody, including Caroline Mabry, the detective, is happy or successful. When they're not dying young of cancer or getting killed or drunk or jailed or stoned or maimed or being too fat or too short or bankrupt they're having psychological problems and worrying about conservative republicans winning elections. I believe this is known in the mystery/suspense business as transcending the genre. I myself don't always want the genre transcended but this is very well written and a compelling page-turner.

Clark Mason arrives in the Spokane police department one Friday night, looking like any other homeless person. Only he isn't. Behind his disheveled appearance, his mysterious eye patch and his quirky behavior, he holds information to a murder.

Not believing him at first, Detective Caroline Mabry discards him as a lunatic, a nuisance, a bother. Clark soon convinces her, however, that there is more to his story than meets the eye. Under her consent, he proceeds to write his self-proclaimed confession for the next nineteen hours.

While Clark is busy penning his confession, Caroline is busy tracking down the tiny pieces of information she gleans from him. Slowly, she pieces together the story he is writing, his confession of how everything went wrong with his world.

But is he really a murderer? And if he is, whom did he murder?

Despite protests that usually an investigation starts with a body, not a killer, Clark is determined to convey his story to her in the best way he knows how: through the telling of his life story, and all the events leading up to the day he met Caroline.

Land of the Blind is an intriguing novel from start to finish, right down to its unusual chapter titles. Written unlike any other crime novel, its vivid descriptions and unusual twists keep the reader guessing. At times humorous and at times horrifying, this novel moves fluidly between the past and the present to tell a story unlike any other.

Astonishingly well-written, laced with humor and insights. A little known gem of a book. It is a story within a story, a coming of age story within a mystery.

In the second part of the book, an interesting riff on BLOOD MERIDIAN (which is to say, on human nature and war) is combined with a riff on Jean Sheperd's IN GOD WE TRUST, ALL OTHERS PAY CASH (a.k.a. "RED RYDER NAILS THE CLEVELAND STREET KID" or CHRISTMAS STORY).

The kid protagonist is conscripted and made to fight another everyman, his nerdish and autistic doppelgänger named Eli, and both are drawn into a BB gun war. The true geology of this kid/autistic existence is based not upon stone but fear. One of the best mini-parables of war I have found lately, and the writing is consistantly keen throughout the novel.

This makes me wonder why I had not heard of it before.

If, like me, you enjoyed this novel and are hungering for more, you might also enjoy Nanci Kincade's AS HOT AS IT WAS, SHE OUGHT TO THANK ME and Michael C. White's A BROTHER'S BLOOD, which also feature female protagonists and beautiful writing.

I see that Jess Walter has a few other highly acclaimed novels, so I have now sent for TUMBLING OVER GRAVES, CITIZEN VINCE, and his latest novel, ZERO. What a find!

Fantastic story, well-written. The people who move through the story are very flawed, yet they held my interest. The tone reminds me a bit of Keith Snyder's books, with milder wry humor.

This is an out-of genre novel inhabiting a mystery, so well-written that it is impossible not to identify with the murderer as he dictates his "confession" on yellow legal pads, the detective in charge, Caroline Mabry, waiting to find out exactly what crime was committed and the identity of the victim. To the confessor, Clark Mason, this is "a story of weakness not of strength". But he is judging his life from the perspective of childhood, when betrayals are more devastating, leaving scars that never heal. Clark sits in an interrogation room in the Spokane P.D., scribbling page after page, a sad tale of personal transgressions and human flaws that have led to the death of another. This is Clark's burden, his presumed guilt for actions taken and not taken, for the attachments that have brought him to this dark place, a history of disappointments and failures as a friend.

Clark Mason straddles the line of acceptance as a young boy, half of him firmly entrenched on the side of the misfits, those unfortunates who draw the jeers of more popular kids. Clark cannot help but feel sorry for Eli Boyle, a boy who is constantly tormented by his classmates. As the years drag by, Clark outgrows his earlier awkwardness, though Eli never does, forever the brunt of bullies' practical jokes. Even after losing his eye in an accident, Clark recovers and goes on to hold class offices, driven to find acceptance. Because of their early bond, Clark works with Eli, teaching him how to dress and act and the direction of Clark's life is determined by this close friendship with the gawky youth.

Caroline Mabry cannot determine exactly who the victim is, and for reasons even she cannot understand, will not pressure Clark or force a confession before he is ready. Instead, she lurks around the fringes of the purported crime, contacting people who have been close to Clark, making sure that all of them are, indeed, alive. This unbidden empathy for the troubled man confuses Carolyn, but she follows her instincts, holding out against all the principles of police work.

The beauty of this novel is found in Clark's honest portrayal of his own life, one laced with poignant revelations, a gutsy clarity that comes from nothing left to lose. His is not a glamorous world, nor is Spokane more than a city of origin, but Clark's journey from child to man is littered with regrets and poor choices, the weight of his past burdening the present. For all his flaws, Mason is an extremely sympathetic character, his attachment to Eli another example of a generous nature. Peppered with an assortment of oddballs and misfits, Walter lays out a human landscape where life fails to deliver on the promises of youth. These are ordinary people struggling to survive when the days have lost the bright luster of success and what remains is simple, unadorned reality. All things considered, Clark's dark night of the soul is a solitary journey, one he is committed to finish with some degree of honor. In the end, "maybe it is all we can do sometimes to save ourselves". Luan Gaines/2005.

I write books for a living. I edit books. I publish books. I =live= books. But I rarely find myself impressed by books.

I'm impressed enough with Jess Walter to read his books. Now I find myself impressed enough with Land of the Blind to get off my jaded butt to recommend it to anyone who was ever teased in school, or bullied, or humiliated, or moved by the fear of any of the above to act against his better nature.

This is a book written in pain; it is painful to read, painful to relive personal moments like the moments it churns back into the light. Beyond being a work of beauty wrought from words, it is a book of truth wrought from memories of pain.

If you were ever, for just one moment, a schoolkid in over your head, with repressed memories of the you you'd rather not face, here's that rare opportunity to take it out, to examine it, to tell you that it wasn't as bad as it seemed.

Land of the Blind is a lifetime's worth of truth-telling therapy for about [...].